September Corn

Two prints share this title. One is 7 × 7 inches, an open edition dated 1998 on the artist’s site. The other is a 12 × 12 inch woodcut of 1986 from her Suite of the Months, as captioned by the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Size tells them apart.^1,3

An auction house describes a small impression as dated 1982, pencil signed and titled, which is earlier than the artist’s own date.⁵

This image exists as a hand-pulled woodcut and as later ink-jet prints. The sold listings in our snapshot do not say which was sold, so check the medium of any listing before comparing prices.

Sabra Field prints in general

She signs her prints in pencil and calls the pencil signature her guarantee: it means she has seen, signed and approved the print. That applies to her ink-jet prints as well as her hand-pulled woodcuts, so the signature alone does not tell you which you have.^6,7

The same image can exist as a hand-pulled woodcut and as a later ink-jet print. When the blocks of an open edition wore out, a proof was scanned and printed as an IRIS print. Her catalog names the medium of each print: “Woodcut on Japanese Paper”, “IRIS Print” or “Archival Pigment”.^8,6,9

Her IRIS prints carry a small “hand” chop next to the signature: her own handprint, showing white against color. Her woodcuts do not. In 2009 she used the same chop to mark giclée prints. Later she stopped adding it to archival pigment prints, so a print with no chop is not necessarily a hand-pulled woodcut.^8,10,6

Paper is the other clue. She describes IRIS paper as stiff and her woodblock paper as flexible, and says archival pigment prints are on sturdier, whiter paper. Under glass, she says, an IRIS print is hard to tell from a woodcut.^8,6

All identification notes for Sabra Field prints